The Rohlf
Report
On the last night of the
Paris I/O-Convention I met Simon Pierce, organbuilder from Brisbane. He
had just finished half a year of training with the Klais company in Bonn.
His own company, which he had founded in 1987, was my first stop during my
tour through Australia.
I was able to get to know its background
during the three weeks that I worked there. The workshop is located in the
garage and base of the Pierce's family home. Plans are already underway
for a new workshop at the back of the property.
To a European the
neighbouring land seems like a little jungle. The sounds of exotic birds
accompany the workers in the open plan workshop. The garage doors are
always open because here it never gets that cold that you would need to
close them. Lively activity is going on behind the house, where ducks,
geese and children now and then visit the three organbuilders as do the
dog and cat.
Simon Pierce, born in England in 1960, has instrument
building in his blood. For a long time his father didn't tell him that his
mother's family consisted of pianotuners and violinbuilders, as he didn't
want to see his own son in such a difficult profession. He himself was an
organist and had moved to England to study and work.
Simon loved to
go to organ concerts but became more interested in the technical side of
the instrument. When he finished school in Sydney he asked organbuilder
Tony Welby for a traineeship. He had alread started studies at university
and thought that organbuilders and organists were weird people. As a
result, Pierce decided to continue with his studies in literature and art
history. "That's when I realised that there are weirder people around than
organists and organbuilders," says Simon Pierce.
He completed his
Arts degree in 1982 and then started an apprenticeship with J.W. Walker
Australia, a branch of the English company in Sydney. Walker tried to
establish another branch in Brisbane where Pierce was transferred to.
However this didn't work out and in 1985 they finally closed down the
whole Australian branch. Pierce decided to stay and work for Brisbane
organbuilder Bert Jarrott. Joining the Humber Car Club, his second great
passion, he met his wife and later on his first employee.
David
Hudd, one of Pierce's colleagues from Walker had begun his own business in
Brisbane and decided to sell it after only 18 months. Pierce took this
opportunity to buy the business and take over the last contract. This was
a restoration and installing of a Driver and Lupton organ from 1897 which
had just been sold to Australia.
At the same time the Klais
company was installing an organ in the Brisbane Concert Hall and asked
Pierce to help and to maintain the instrument in the future. Ten years
later Pierce contacted the company again to ask for advice because he
wanted to work in the USA. Instead he got the offer to work on a team
building the new organ for the Cologne Cathedral. An offer which he could
not resist. For half a year he moved to Germany with his family and he is
thinking of repeating this kind of traineeship in future.
After
having experienced the English style of organbuilding in Australia, Pierce
got to know the French style of voicing with Klais as their voicer had
been trained in France. Upon his return to Brisbane, he applied his new
skills during the restoration of an old Whitehouse organ. After the
opening concert the organist said to him that he had never heard such a
French sound coming out of a Whitehouse organ!
Today Simon Pierce
employs two people, Richard Fenney who started his apprenticeship with him
in 1987, and Derek Smart who has been employed since 1994. Smart was the
last apprentice of the Whitehouse Brothers Compnay, which had been founded
in 1898, had about 50 employees in the 1930s and had to close down in
1980. Pierce got to know Smart with Bert Jarrott, who also had worked for
Whitehouse. Smart originally founded his own shop of furniture restoration
and helped Pierce in building cases, before he finally returned to
organbuilding.
About 50% of the work consists of maintenance within
the whole state of Queensland, which means spending a lot of time on the
road. A major part of the work is maintaining the Willlis organ in the
Brisbane City Hall. The other half is repairing or whole restorations of
mainly English organs from the turn of the century. This way Simon Pierce
gathers experience with organs of builders such as Moeller (American,
Bundaberg), Whitehouse (Maryborough, 1910; Ipswich), Norman and Beard
(Toowoomba, 1907) or Benson (Surfers Hill, 1888).
v This is how you
can learn through other people's good work, but also through their
mistakes, says Pierce. You get to know much about the functioning of the
action in the subtropical climate of this region. Pierce applies this
knowledge when building new organs. The main problem of the subtropics is
not necessarily the high humidity as generally the temperature remains the
same, which is very good for the action, but and extreme change in
humidity ranging from between 70% and 5%. An action has to be able to cope
with these changes in the Queensland climate. Pierce is using balanced
action, aluminium pallets and treats the wooden trackers with shellac. For
the cases he uses Tasmanian Oak, but for the windchests he prefers plywood
for safety reasons and pertinax for the sliders.
So far he has
built only three new instruments, but they are already working of the next
one, a house organ with 22 stops on two manuals.
List of new
organs:
1993 St. George's Anglican Church, Tamborine Mountain 9/I, 2/P
1996
Chamber organ for Peter Roennfeldt 4/I
1999 Chapel of St. Stephen's
Cathedral, Brisbane 4/I
For new instruments, but also for restorations one of the most
important factors for Pierce is that the organ adapts to the room, not
only the outside concerning the style of the case but mainly the sound.
The acoustics of churches and concert halls in Australia rarely is of
advantage for organs. I think this is a worldwide problem, especially in
new buildings, if you don't have a very musical architect.
Pierce
feels an echo of more than two seconds already means an exception in this
country. In any case the acoustically ideal position for an instrument has
to be found for each room. For that you also have to consider the material
of the walls and the ceiling. At the best you then develop the stop list
of the instrument and then set up the scalings for the chorus, the
mixtures and the reeds. In rooms which are poor of acoustics Pierce tends
to use wider scaling with lower cutups. So the sound can develop within
the pipe and then spread into the room. His scalings are developed from
the William Hill scalings from around 1880. He likes to voice at the
pipe's foot and at the mouth and he is pro nickings.
The Australian
organbuilder also has to cope with the special wishes of the organists.
Simon Pierce takes his customers to different instruments, plays them and
talks about their needs and wishes. Pierce: "We don't live in a perfect
world, we all have limitations, and naturally musical instruments have
limitations. The organists then get to understand where the particular
limitations are and within these boundaries you expand the organ, develop
it and make it as musical as possible."
"When I am doing the tonal
voicing, I like to have the consultant and the organist there. We work
together on it. It helps them to be a part of the process. And it is good
to have a couple of people there to try out the instrument various times a
day, various ways of approaching, with various music. In fact I never had
any problem doing this because in the end we always agree. And you do some
teaching as well as you learn. Because they can show you what they want to
be able to do with the instrument and it is making you realise the
possibilities what it should be able to do. And also as you work together
doing it, it's not only one person's approach to it. It becomes more
universal."
In my eyes this is a good way of teaching organists and
consultants, but for sure takes more time. Wouldn't it be worth a thought
of training offers like this for organists, consultants and architects
within the ISO? For sure also organbuilders should know a little more
about organ literature than some of them do.
Simon Pierce so far
has only built small instruments, be he says: "I am quite happy to say
that we build small organs!" That should be viewed as a positive thing,
because small instruments can become very intimate, and he draws the
popular comparison to wine. On only one stop, he says, you can make music
all day. If you put the instrument in the right spot of the building, if
you have the right scaling you do not need a lot of stops to accompany
music and to be a worthwhile instrument.
A pipe organ does not
necessarily need two manuals and pedals, you can make music on one manual
without pedals. "In Queensland we have plenty of big electric action
organs of very round tone, which are basically hymn machines. They are not
musical instruments. They do their job in church. But I'm not sure that
you can call them beautiful."
Small instruments do offer different
possibilities than big concert organs, which most organists don't seem to
realise, says Pierce. There are different organs for different situations,
which again is comparable to wine. Organists of big organs miss out on the
feeling of the complete control as the finger on the string and the bow
coming together or like the voice, says Pierce. That's where it should get
back to.
Pierce has also undertaken a week of training with the
Australian pipe making company George Fincham near Melbourne, which he
wants to repeat. Couldn't the ISO support this kind of extra training in
arranging exchange programs? In the Pierce workshop so far some wooden
pipes have been built. But now Pierce wants to extend this also to metal
pipes, which still is rare in Australian organbuilding. This is also a
reason why Pierce plans to start building a new shop which he is hoping to
move into next year.
Anja Rohlf
(ORGELBAU ROHLF)
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